From the Tome of Chaos:

Praetoria has a problem. The first few animated robotic battle mages were useful - they scared away the screeching vultures and harpies, and the Harvesters and Sunkai could finally work the fields. Plus, they made useful battle practice for aspiring young battle mages, on their road to glory.

But over time, they started to increase. We now see swarms of robotic battle mages. These automatons are everywhere. They utter metallic cries of "VONAK!" at all hours of the day or night - caring not if they win or lose, but only to bring harvest the power of the Splintershards for their their hidden masters.

The League of Vericho has determined that these mechanical mages have become too numerous to abolish - the only way to control these automatons is to start a registry.

Executive Summary:

Botting in Splinterlands is a messy topic. However, most players and investors agree that there are too many active bots, and their ability to operate in perpetuity, with minimal capital, allows an outsize impact on the economy and the playerbase.

REALITY CHECK:
Most web games don't allow botting at all. Here in Splinterlands, we allow it. This is a privilege that any account owner has, and this privilege has value - to earn "playing rewards" without committing time.

So if I bot, it EARNS something for ME, but I acknowledge it also TAKES from the COMMUNITY.

This proposal intends to give the community better transparency into automated battle activity, and also to give the DAO more control on the ability for large scale "bot farming" to create negative impacts on the ecosystem, at what is expected to be a very minimal development cost.

There are two goals to this proposal:

1. Better Data for Better Decisions: Give Splinterlands and the community better data on botted activity, to make better decisions
2. Alignment of Rewards vs Participation: Create an economic hurdle, specifically applicable to accounts using automated battle bots, to reduce the ability to operate in perpetuity with minimal capital or player engagement.

Phase 1:

• Non-transferrable Battle Automation Licenses are to be sold by the DAO for players that want to use a bot to play their account. Cost should be low but recurring.
• Battle Automation services (public or private) are required to add an Automation field to each battle submitted, True or false and optionally the name of the service used recorded on the battle chain.
• Update to Terms of Service - no changes to where you are allowed to bot, but botting > needs a licence, and needs to identify their battles where they are submitted using a bot.

After this is running, we will start to measure and manage, and fine tune:

Phase 2:

• Splinterlands or Third Parties could use battle chain results to obtain reliable data on automated battle volume and reward share since each battle will be labelled with bot activity
• Cost for Battle Automation Licenses can be periodically adjusted for these licenses to manage supply/demand in line with desired match liquidity parameters.
• Better data will potentially help Splinterlands in their ToS enforcement efforts
• Look for opportunities to fine tune and reward real players with bragging rights, badges or real rewards.

Discussion: What are we trying to achieve?

Look, we always want REAL PLAYERS - regardless of their budget. So anyone can manually play in any league and we don't want to discourage that in any way.

But some players have invested a lot, play when they have time, and want to have the bot run sometimes when life gets busy. I am not going to debate the merits of that - it's the way it is.

But I think we can all agree that the number of low quality bots is too many. The sheer volume of these accounts has dwarfed the rest of the playerbase, and has many unfortunate side effects, such as low quality matches in high leagues and excessively diluted reward pools.

For example, at the time of writing, having reviewed a subset of botted accounts in Diamond 1 receiving around $0.10 per day of SPS, and found single BCX rented decks: spending $0.02 in DEC for cards and $0.02 for a modest SPS rental, using a multiplier of 3x. This is a very scalable profit margin, and so the incentive to continue scaling, and adding accounts is clearly obvious. Second hand accounts are widely available from former botters and disillusioned players for a fraction of the cost of a new spellbook. So all signs point to this situation getting worse, not better.

I would propose that the community can help to limit the number of bots by requiring bots to declare themselves, and to pay a small registration fee to the DAO. This is to create an economic equalizer, to prevent unlimited and perpetual expansion of low-quality, high-volume bot farms to unsustainable levels. As we know, that is just a race to the bottom.

Looking at the Numbers

I'd suggest, based on these "real world" bot profitability numbers, that an automated account that earns 5-10 SPS per day, so $0.10 and pays $0.04 each day is not the kind of purely-profit-driven player we are looking for. If there are 25,000 of these, that means 150,000 SPS per day are going to these bots...

So let's set the cost of botting a bit higher than that to start with, while we get some data.
I'm proposing this as a starting point for a license to bot your account.

• $0.10 per day per account, in DEC
• Minimum licence period is 14 days, but you can prepay up to 26 weeks in advance.
• Licence proceeds go to the DAO (since it's the DAO paying the reward pool)
• DAO could decide to burn a portion, or send a portion to the team
• Cooldown period is something to consider.

Potential Outcome A: Unprofitable Bots quit, reward pool share per account increases, some rental income will decrease
I expect that many of the "least-desired" low-value botted accounts will be immediately unprofitable if they pay for a license.

As a result, these accounts may reduce their scale of operations to their higher value accounts (good), or they may try to operate in the shadows, in violation of the ToS. At that point, the team can point to the community will, enforcing the ToS accordingly, and they will have a clear mandate and better data to focus their enforcement activity.

Low end rental income also decreases - but remember that these are accounts that are spending less on rent than they are earning in SPS, so I think this is net positive for higher value assets.

Potential Outcome B: No one quits. Tens of thousands of Bots Farms are somehow still profitable, DAO gets Millions of DEC per Day for bot licenses

I don't think this is the likely scenario. But it's possible. If this happens, we use our data and decide if the price of the Licenses is commensurate with the value received.

I wonder how much impact there would be on SPS burning if we would start locking away that much DEC every day?

Wild players: Just some Food for Thought...
If 20,000 low end bots shut down, do you think that your battle earnings would increase by more than $0.10 per day?
Or what's the impact to your daily SPS if 20,000 bots start to burn 100 DEC each day?

Crowdfunding a proposal...

So I think significant community interest means this post gets upvoted to at least 30 Hive and 200+ upvotes, that means there's a legitimate level of community interest. (I'm going to exclude downvotes for the calculation)...
If we hit those two targets, I'd suggest we consider crowdfunding the 100,000 DEC for the proposal.

So if you like it, upvote, reblog, share, get your guildmates to upvote, etc. If you don't like it, downvote if you feel it's necessary, but know that this phase is ignoring downvotes. The threshold for gauging community interest right now is only UPVOTES. Anyone that likes the idea so much they want to help crowdfund the proposal, please make a DEC commitment in the comments.

So then if it gets to 30 Hive, I'll kick in the first 20,000 DEC... and I'd encourage supporters of the idea to offer to commit some DEC for the proposal fee. If we get more than 100K in commitments, then we can do prorata or something.

(Please don't send anything at this time, unless we get enough community support to move forward)

Feedback and Community Voice

I expect others will have other suggestions, so please add your opinionsto the comments below, and if you like the ideas of others, please vote for them so that we have more data.

Please vote for as many as you think you would support if this were a real SPS proposal...